


Good Enough for Me

by SegaBarrett



Category: Me and Bobby McGee - Janis Joplin (Song)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-18
Updated: 2019-05-18
Packaged: 2020-03-07 04:19:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18865576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: Snapshots and memories of the road have to be good enough, for now.





	Good Enough for Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [newyorktopaloalto](https://archiveofourown.org/users/newyorktopaloalto/gifts).



She liked to smoke when she thought about him, which she usually tried not to do if she could help it. Smoking in a rocking chair, like an old woman reminiscing. 

It was like she was killing herself that little bit when she did, and that felt right, because she was opening up the floodgates and letting all the shit come out, rushing out to stab at her a hundred times over.

She had used it as her New Year’s Resolution a few years in a row, now – just don’t think about it.

Her best girlfriend had told her, fed up at last, to “just stop dwelling on it”. Of course she dwelled on it; “try not to think of a white bear”.

It haunted her dreams, drifted through her mind during her waking hours. Every second, she thought that she could turn around and see him. To see Bobby all over again.

She could see his trails; that was what she called them in her head. There were a lot of words she made up in her head to describe the two of them. Like a dictionary all their own.

She would have shared it with him, if she could, bound it up in a big bow that was as red as his big, red, beating heart, the one she felt so distinctly when she had held his body close and held her own breath.

The woman let her long legs snake out over the recliner as she took another cigarette out of the pack. She struck the match and inhaled, wondering if she might burn her fingers a second, just a flash to bring her back out of the past. Because that was what it was, the nostalgic past without any of the hurt and the burn it had had in real life.

Real life never seemed real.

She was living in Los Angeles now, had been for about a month after Salinas. She could hear her own voice in her head, trying to call out after him but finding it caught in her throat. She had to let him go. 

“If you love someone, set them free.” Wasn’t that what the saying was? But whoever had said it had never met Bobby, and letting go of him had never seemed as easy as the phrase made it appear. 

The phone rang, and she jumped in her seat, cursing as the ash burnt her finger. She tried to pick it up with one hand as she smothered the cigarette in the ashtray with the other, sighing out.

“Yes? Jackie here,” she declared.

“…Hey.”

The voice on the other end was faded, quiet, and there was what sounded like a thousand miles of cracking ahead of it. But, yes, she recognized it. Of course she did.

***

“You know, I think they make these small towns on some kind of a grid. Like it’s the law that they all have to have the same four stores all in a row.”

She looked up and let out a small snort at the comment by the boy beside her. His hair hung down to his shoulders and was chestnut-brown, and he had the biggest blue eyes that she had ever seen. He was dressed in a leather jacket and jeans and looked like he had just walked off the copy of some latter-day Harlequin.

And he was talking to her.

“You’re an idiot,” Jackie declared, looking over at him. “It’s just luck of the draw. I’m sure if you saw a hundred places, they’d have to have some overlap somewhere along the line. Not that I would know.”

“Never been traveling far?”

“Never been out of New Jersey,” she admitted.

“Whoo, well, we can’t have that, now can we?”

He was holding her hand before she could tell him to get lost, that none of his corny lines would work on her.

Because they had.

***

Louisiana was a state that was teeming with life; what kind of life it was depended largely on which part of it one had ended up in.

Jackie loved New Orleans most of all; it was as if one big party had been tied into some kind of a loop for her.

Bobby, on the other hand, loved Baton Rouge. She tried to figure out what it was about it, tried to drop little hints that she wanted to know about his past, where he had come from.

“It seems like you know it here. Is this where you’re from?”

She tried to imagine him as a schoolboy, as a baby in a crib chewing on his fingers, but found that she was unable. Maybe he had just appeared, one day, fully formed.

“You don’t want to know that,” he had said, but she head it as “you don’t need to know that”. 

They climbed on a train and sat side by side, letting their abandoned car sit by the side of the road. Jackie could imagine weeds overtaking it, maybe pulling it into a swamp like something out of a horror movie.

They didn’t talk, much, touched more, let their hands travel to one another as if they were afraid of what it might mean. And if she was honest with herself, she always was. 

***

She shouldn’t be sitting here thinking about it, she thought to herself. Silly and stupid to get caught up in memories, letting an old film play again and again in her head, ragged and black and white where the audio didn’t match up because someone was playing it separately.

She could have made it all end differently; maybe she even had that ability at the time. It had been good enough at the time, hadn’t it? She had loved, loved, loved him – had repeated those words over and over again until they ran together and lost all meaning.

And now there was no one left to talk about it with, because she had talked herself out.

Now, she shouldn’t dwell on it. That had been good advice, hadn’t it?

If she loved him so much, why had she let him go?

***

She had seen that wandering look in his eye, the same one he’d had when he had told her that it was time for them to leave.

“I can’t stay in this place. I’m trapped like a rat, running in a wheel. Eventually, I’ll run myself to death.”

She didn’t know why she had gone, then. Why she had grabbed his hand and told her that anywhere he went, she would go too.

And now he had that trapped look all over again.

They were just outside Salinas. 

She couldn’t run anymore.

“You should go.” 

If it had been a movie, that would have been when she would have yelled at him, pushed him away, insulted him. When she would have told him that he had never meant anything to her at all.

And then he would have come back to her at the end and they would have ridden off in the sunset together.

But it wasn’t a movie.

In her heart, she never left Salinas.

But it was all right. She shouldn’t dwell on it.

The memories had been good enough for her.


End file.
